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Yesterday I published a post on the Search Engine People site titled 50+ Sites to Help You Bury Negative Posts About You or Your Company!.

While the tactics mentioned may be enough to push some negative online mentions of you or your business to the second page of the search results or lower, in other cases they will not. The question then becomes; what else can you do when the initial tactics themselves aren’t enough, and you’ve got a negative piece about you ranking in the search results for an important phrase. Burying your head in the sand and hoping it goes away isn’t really a viable option. The answer … LOTS can be done!

Lets start with our goals … they’re progressive.

Progressive Goals:
Goal #1: First … bump the listing below the fold asap
then
Goal #2: Bump the listing off the first page of the search results for the given term(s)

With goals in hand, we can now consider tactics.

Tactics:
To Achieve Goal #1:

a. select the strongest 3-5 of those 50+ sites, where strong is a subjective assessment based on many factors. My personal assessment would be:

1. Digg
2. Twitter
3. Stumbleupon
4. MyBlogLog
5. Linkedin

b. establish a profile on each, where the profile name is the term/phrase the negative piece ranks for
c. get lots of friends on each of those sites … the more the better. It works best if you take an active role and participate. Each friend will result in an internal link back to your profile on that site, making it stronger.
d. within each site, you can see which profiles are the strongest in the offending engines’ eyes … the search engines themselves with rank them in order of importance given a simple search query (eg. site:twitter.com). Try to secure links from the strongest profiles first … they pass the most value.
e. join groups where possible too … often these will pass link power to your profile as well.
f. possibly create a social profiles menu on your site(s), and link to each of these profiles.

To Achieve Goal #2:

a. determine how far down you actually wish to push the piece. Beyond the first page will take a great deal of time and energy.
b. assuming you’ve already bumped the offending post below the fold, you need to select the number of sites you will need to use from the 50 + listed in the 50+ Sites to Help You Bury Negative Posts About You or Your Company! article.
c. follow the steps outlined above for each
d. within each (where possible) include links to all your other profiles on the other sites

Following these steps should be enough to push most negative mentions to the second page. If not, or if you don’t have the time and energy, do engage the services of a professional with experience in the space. Aside from the obvious value … its not a bad idea to take out profiles under your name anyway, just as a pre-emptive measure.

Please note … these tactics are by no means comprehensive or advanced. They’re just a relatively quick and efficient means for burying negative online mentions. Much more advanced tactics exist, which I will not delve into here.

Other great reference posts about reputation management include:
Glen Allsopp - What Is Online Reputation Management
Andy Beal - Free Online Reputation Management Beginner’s Guide
Todd Malicoat - Reputation Management Emancipation PRoclamation - 10 Ways to Own Yourself Online
Lee Odden - Basics of Online Reputation Management
Marty Weintraub - 9 Essential Tactics for Reputation Management in Social Media
Andy Beal - Buzz Monitoring: 26 Free Buzz Tracking Tools
David Wallace - Using Social Media to Help Manage Online Reputation

CNN is reporting that Student James Karl Buck twittered his way out of jail with a single-word text messages after being arrested. The “twit” (message) communicated to his “tweeple” (friends) on micro blogging platform "Twitter," resulted in pals hiring a lawyer. Buck twittered all during the experience, the transcript of which is visible here. This is yet another case study speaking to the societal power of modern networking tools.

There is a lot of passion regarding Twitter in the search marketing community, with top SEOs/social media pros like Lee Odden and DoshDosh having dozens or even hundreds of “followers.”

Respected link builder Jennifer Laycock has written extensively regarding applications of the platform. Others use Twitter (on their computer and/or phone) to stay in constant touch with family, customers and friends throughout each day. Twitter deployed recently in Japan with advertising in an attempt to leverage the channel. Stay tuned…

Other Twitter Resources:
The Many Uses of Twitter
techipedia

Twitter: Different Ways to Use Twitter
Lifehacker

200+ Internet Marketing Gurus on Twitter
Marketing Pilgrim

51 Favorite SU, Sphinn, Twitter & Facebook Posts of 2007
SocialDesire

Calm down – I know your heart is probably pounding like crazy right now, especially if you are working on your own blog which focuses on SEO. I felt the same way when I started reading Lee Odden’s post about Wordpress labeling SEO blogs as “banned .” Reading on, however, it was made [...]

Our panel at SES NYC yesterday was about how to get authoritative links and what that can do for your search ranking. The moderator was Sage Lewis, panelists were Lee Odden, Chris Boggs and me.

Chris took the more traditional approach and explained how to leverage directories, associations and sponsorships.

Lee and I spoke about the other PR - public relations. SEO-PR is a term that has been around for about 4 or 5 years now. When optimizing press releases first became an option the PR industry did not adopt the practice. SEO firms immediately saw the value, but they lacked the PR and ‘newshound’ skills needed to create a great news story.

Those who attended this session really got how using PR skills to create great content and then pitchi that news story to relevant online news sites and bloggers can have a huge influence on your search ranking.

When you understand that Google’s PageRank and “links as votes” system is basically a PR model of third party endorsement and trust, this makes perfect sense.

What is an authoritative site?

* One with a large number of pages
* One that has themed content
* One that has links in and out to similarly themed content.
* One that has a high PageRank

News or media sites are authoritative sites. And as any PR person knows, mentions in the media carry a lot of weight as a third party endorsement..

So the trick is to find a news angle in some piece of content you already have, or some activity within your company. Here are a few examples:

A company that supplies business phone systems had a product that assists call centers to track who they call. When the Do Not Call list became an iaaue and the Supreme Court ruling came out they sent out a press release about how their software could keep a call center compliant with this new law. It got a lot of coverage and built them a ton of links.

HerRoom.com a leading online retailer of lingerie, had a series of videos on their site that show how effective various makes of sports bras are at reducing breast movement while exercising. A bit of PR digging to find the news angle in this content turned up the fact that Dr. Joanna Scurr, a professor at the University of Portsmouth in the UK, has been doing scientific research in this field and some large media sites covered the story.

HerRoom contacted Dr Scurr and hosted a live interview with her about her research. She spoke about breast movement during exercise and the probl;em of breast pian. She also shared results from a medical study in the Uk that found that the best way to deal with breast pain is with a good sports bra.

HerRoom tied in their Bounce Test Videos as a service to women. Now they can see which bras offer the best support, reducing movement and breast pain.

A good press release with the links, podcast and video gor picked up in some major media sites. Bloggers wrote about it. - mommy bloggers, exercise bloggers and health bloggers..Women recommended it.

The podast was registered at podcast sites.

The result in terms of SEO? That page on their site has moved from not in the first 100 a month ago to #14 on page two. And it is still climbing. We have a few big media sites and influential blogs we expect to run the story in the next few weeks. Those links should push it onto page one.

The moral of ths story? Next time you hire an intern look for one who has a PR background, a nose for news and can write great content. You can teach her the SEO part.

4:00AM morning outside the New York Hilton: the city wakeup-crowd stirs pre-dawn Manhattan lights. From the 53rd St. lobby the regal doorman guides me to Kennedy International-bound taxi and deli coffee black…impeccable New York service in hand. The cab ride provides the necessary 30 minute Internet-access window to post aimClear Blog conference coverage waiting in WordPress.  Then it occurs to me: “Dude, I must be pretty screwed up to be blogging in a TAXI.”

Search marketing conference attendees seem to be the most plugged-in-public group of techno-comrades on earth. We rove in packs of iPhone and laptop-totting pied-pipers evangelizing link love, holistic patterns, authentic participation, conversion tracking, and good will. These SEMS, SEOs, PPCs, Mr., Mrs. & Ms are such beautiful people. I love the search marketing industry because ya’ll are SO plugged into the grid, running remote marketing machine empires from Blackberries.

We’re a curious and over-stimulated group, resulting in behavior that will have future anthropologists mumbling to themselves. It’s a great time to be alive and so many incredible ways to connect for business and pleasure. Here’s 13 Undeniable symptoms of total communications-grid immersion.  These are not listed in any particular order of severity.

Search marketers are modern communications channel gatekeepers, technicians, and salespersons, obsessively plugged into the grid. Millennial behavior chatter permeates our culture as SEMs have steadily become the 900 LB mainstream gorilla.

My sense of is that we wouldn’t have it any other way than total grid immersion. Farewell SearchEngineStrategies NYC 2008. &nbsp You’re still the beautiful New York lady, shining city-scene of light and global opportunity. The culture of marketing king-makers, search marketing students and communications-grid pundits rocks my world.

Footnote: Add the measured insanity of “blogging in the airplane isle whilst waiting for the aft cabin bathroom to free up.”

It’s only Day 1 at SES New York 2008 and the folks from Pan Communications have already found more than 40 stories that have been written about the Search Engine Strategies conference. If you want a comprehensive list, Matt McGowan, the Global Vice President of Marketing for Incisive Media, will be posting one later this evening (or early tomorrow morning) on the Search Engine Strategies Blog – when he gets back from the Saint Patrick’s Day pub crawl.

In the meantime, I’ve looked through the news articles and blog posts from Monday, March 17, 2008, to try to identify the top ten stories on Day 1 of the event. While this list is no substitute for actually attending SES New York 2008, it will give you a quick summary of some of the highlights.

1. Yahoo! Cozies Up To Its Click-Fraud Critics
Andy Greenberg of Forbes.com says, “At Monday’s Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference in New York, Yahoo! announced a partnership with click-fraud auditing firm Click Forensics to share pay-per-click advertising data and work together to identify fraudulent clicks–those designed to pump a Web publisher’s advertising revenue or drain a competing advertiser’s budget.”

2. Search Spend Seems Healthy Despite Slowing Economy
Kevin Newcomb of Search Engine Watch says, “Despite an increasingly gloomy economic forecast, spending on search engine marketing continues to grow beyond expectations. Preliminary results of the 2007 State of the Market Survey were released today at Search Engine Strategies New York by SEMPO, the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization.”

3. Kicking Off SES New York 2008
Mike McDonald of WebProNews interviewed Matt McGowan about Search Engine Strategies New York 2008, which kicked off today with about 8,000 attendees. Matt explained what can be expected in the week ahead.

4. Orion Panel: Getting Vertical Search Right
Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable covered the Orion Panel: Getting Vertical Search Right. Barry says, “Jason Finger talks about his online food service. They link people with local restaurants and caterers. Steven Krein is from a human powered health search service. Bill Tancer gives the Hitwise line, love this guy. Josh Stylman from Reprise Media. Paul Forster from Indeed.com a Job Search site.” Barry adds, “This is a unique session.”

5. Analytics: Data Into Action
Lisa Barone of the Bruce Clay Blog covered the Analytics: Data Into Action session. Lisa says, “Kevin Ryan gets things started and says next time he’ll get a bigger room. Hee, seriously. And it’s not that the room is even small, it’s just there are about a gazillion people trying to get in. The SES conference series is alive and well, people.”

6. Neil Patel interviews Jason Calacanis, SES NY 2008

Neil Patel of Pronet Advertising interviewed Jason Calacanis, founder and CEO of Mahalo.com, who will be the afternoon keynote speaker on Wednesday, March 19, 2008. The two discuss issues such as spam, the search engine optimization (seo) philosophy as a whole and its problematic frictions between publishers and users in the battles for visibility and search relevance.

7. Avinash Kaushik, Web Analytics at SES NY 2008

I interviewed Avinash Kaushik, author, blogger, and Analytics Evangelist at Google about the standing-room-only-crowd at the Web Analytics: Measuring Succession session, where he spoke. He also talked about trends in web analytics over the next 24 to 36 months, his highly-rated blog, Occam’s Razor, and his recently published book, Web Analytics: An Hour A Day.

8. Session: Organic Listings Forum
Lee Odden of the Online Marketing Blog covered the Organic Listings Forum. Lee says, “Organic Listings Forum with Mike Grehan moderating and Jill Whalen, Dave Naylor and Greg Boser on the panel. Here we have an all star SEO cast available to answer questions about organic SEO.”

9. SES New York: Video Made the SMB Star (Kelsey Group Track)
Li Evans of Search Marketing Gurus covered the Video Made the SMB Star session. Li says that Mike Boland of the Kelsey Group, who moderated the session, said, “Users are coming to expect Video as part of their search results.”

10. Ad Exchanges - What You Need to Know
Mona Elesseily of Traffick wrote a preview of the Ad Exchanges are Everything session, which will be held at SES New York 2008 on March 19 2008 (Day 3). Mona says, “To learn more about the changes in ad exchanges, I interviewed both Ramsey McGrory, VP of Exchange Development, Right Media and Jay Sears, SVP of Strategic products and business development, ContextWeb.”

Lee Odden, the CEO of TopRank Online Marketing, spoke at the News Search Engine Optimization as well as the Blog & RSS Search Engine Optimization sessions at SES London 2008. He also moderated the one that I covered in “Online Reputation Management Requires Cabinet War Rooms.”

In his spare time, he did a video interview with Adam Lasnik of Google, posted photos from SES London, and covered the “Beyond Linkbait: Getting Authoritative Online Mentions” session on his Online Marketing Blog.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, he found time to be interviewed for our new SES Conference Expo channel on YouTube.

Lee Odden, TopRank Online Marketing, at SES London 2008

For those of you who haven’t met him yet, Lee Odden is a 10+ year Internet marketing veteran and of TopRank Online Marketing. Recognized by MarketingSherpa and topseos.com, TopRank helps Fortune 500 companies with Internet marketing consulting, training, and implementation services.

Lee has been cited in numerous books and industry publications, including The Economist and DM News on the topics of search, social media, and online public relations. He also publishes the Online Marketing Blog, ranked as one of the top 10 marketing blogs online by Advertising Age.

Lee is a regular speaker at Search Engine Strategies, WebmasterWorld Pubcon, DMA Annual Conference, Media Relations Summit, PRSA International Conference, and Mediapost’s Search Insider Summit. At SES New York 2008, he’s speaking at the session, Beyond Linkbait: Getting Authoritative Online Mentions, and will be moderating the Podcast & Audio Search Optimization session.

Our session Beyond Linkbait at SES NYC has a very different approach to SEO and linkbait - how to use traditional public relations tactics to create authoritative links.

It’s all about how to take the content you have and make it newsworthy enough for other sites to want to republish your content or link to your site. Not just Top 10 lists. Real news.

I’m going to share the Bounce Test video story with attendees. Yes, they are videos of women running in sports bras. Giving this a valid science and research backing and making it part of a serious women’s health issue has garnered some major attention for these videos.

Lee Odden has some do’s and don’t’s on how to pitch your stories to bloggers and reporters.

If you think your business doesn’t have a news story you definitely need to come to the session. Every business has a story. How you find that story and then pitch it to the right news medium is the trick. We used to do it for print and TV coverage. Now we do it for links.

SES NYC is fast approaching. My session with Chris Boggs and Lee Odden titled Beyond Linkbait will cover some interesting ideas.

I spoke to Chris today to get his take on the idea of going beyond linkbait.

One topic he’s covering is reciprocal links - good or bad? If done properly, they can still be a good SEO tactic, says Chris. They need to happen naturally and be relevant. He has some great ideas on how to make these links work for SEO and offers examples of what a bad reciprocal link and a good reciprocal link would be.

Chris plans to share a case study about creating content for YouTube or other social media sites that is not intended to produce links directly. “We built a peice of content around a game on a client’s site with the intention of building buzz and getting bloggers to write it about it and then link to the client’s site where the game is hosted,” explained Chris.

They’ve had over 25 000 views on YouTube and a flood of links and traffic to the client’s site.

Sounds like a hard act to follow!

My case study is about The Bounce Test videos and how we took this content and turned it into a serious women’s health issue backed by research that got coverage from influential bloggers and mainstream media sites.

See you in New York on the 20th March
.

With sitemaps cross-hosting (or cross-submission), Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft cracked open the door for corporations to outsource search engine optimization.

How big a deal is this?

Not enough to make Robert Scoble cry. Or join the circus.

When SEL broke the news at SMX (described in excellent summary by Vanessa Fox of vanessfoxnude fame), I was hoping for a revolutionary change. Then I read the blog posts at the Google Webmaster Central, Yahoo Search and Live Search Webmaster Center blogs so you don’t have to. (I’m just kidding all you search engine PR gals … and guy.)

Robots.txt ruined my night. I felt like I was decepticonned - hoping for the breakthrough that would make outsourcing SEO much easier for major corporations. Or an announcement that might provide guidance for SEOs to improve rankings for their clients.

SEW Experts SEM Crossfire columnist Chris Boggs ended the robots nightmare: “I think it’s a big step forward in making it easier for companies to outsource, but the caveat is having full access to the robots.txt. Some industries such as banking and pharma may still have issues.”

Still, we don’t want to beat up on the search engines (unnecessarily). In the past, search engines required companies with multiple Web sites to have “one set of servers to rule them all.”

In short, search engines required sitemaps to be on the same host and path as the URLs they contained. That meant the same server needed to host both sitemaps and site content.

Google, Yahoo and Live Search put aside their fierce competition for a moment to make life a little easier for Webmasters and SEOs by standardizing sitemaps in November 2006, when the Big Three formed Sitemaps.org.

SEW Experts By The Numbers columnist, Eric Enge, CEO of Stone Temple Consulting, noted, “The announcement affects Web site owners who don’t have the freedom to place a sitemaps file in the root directory of the domain. Historically, site owners without the ability to place a file in the root folder for their domain haven’t been able to make use of sitemaps.”

A cross-hosting sitemaps scenario or two?

“There are many scenarios. Shared hosting environments and people in large corporations who may be running subdomains of a much larger site,” said Enge. “This now allows them to place the sitemaps file in a different location, even on another server or domain. The sitemaps file then needs to be pointed to by the robots.txt file for the original domain. The site owner will still need the ability to make that change.”

Search Engine Watch, for example, has several domains and subdomains. Our main domain, searchenginewatch.com, features a few subdomains: blog.searchenginewatch.com, forums.searchenginewatch.com and jobs.searchenginewatch.com, for example.

Now we can host all our sitemaps in one location or subdomain: such as “notreally-oursitemaps.searchenginewatch.com.”

So what does cross-hosting mean for the global SEO community?

“Ultimately this opens up the site maps protocol to a large number of site owners who couldn’t make use of it before,” said Enge. “The SEO impact really relates to that fact. SEOs may not have been able to use sitemaps on a site previously, due to the limitations of the prior implementation. Now those SEOs have the capability available to them.”

Cool.

“The impact of offsite hosting for sitemaps? It will make it easier for sitemap management by allowing site owners to manage multiple sitemaps in one location,” explained Lee Odden of TopRank. “It will also make it easier for those with sites that use subdomains.”

So bottom line: will SEOs be able to leverage cross-hosting to improve rankings for targeted keywords?

“As for impact on rankings, it’s no different than the effect of making sitemap data available previously,” said Odden. “Providing a list of URLs to search engines serves as a supplemental source of information to what their spiders would find in the wild.”

Here’s how it works:

“Search engines make no guarantee that providing URLs in a sitemap will increase the number of pages indexed - but they might,” said Odden. “So in that regard, making it easier for sites that previously did not provide sitemaps, especially subdomains, may help them get more pages indexed, but I see no effect on actual rankings.”

For the Google Guy’s take on sitemaps, nofollow and other great tips, read the highest ranked Matt Cutts interview ever done (by Eric Enge).